Program Notes: Take a look at this excellent video — which gives me an excuse to pile on George Will and the once-proud Post.

For starters, and for yet another reason that you should never trust George Will, take a look at this excellent video.

It’s not just a good piece of reporting, it’s a really smart use of the medium.

A digression, born of my days as a science documentarian:  This short emerged out of some basic production decisions. To my eye, moving images appear to have been shot on a decent cheap camera — a few thousand bucks worth, not more.

The other production resources were even more modest:   stills, acceptable quality sound and nothing else — no lights, no fancy grip gear, nothing.  From the credits, it appears to have been the work of a one-man band:  shot, directed, cut, audio recording all by the same multi-headed person.

And that’s the key:  this video is pleasing as well as useful to watch because the shooter/director did not try to finesse the fact of his production constraints.  Instead, he chose to use what he had to make the best simple film he could.  The most ostensibly “produced” moment in the entire piece is the graphic swoosh of the LA Times logo at the head of the work.

In the body of the video, what you get are well composed shots;  clean, sometimes beautiful images within those frames; a careful, clear interview that produced enough clear narrative to voice the entire piece; and an editing sensibility that emphasized  rhythm and dynamic variation.  Nothing fancy, just solid work in the service of clearly understood production and narrative ideas. This is a glimpse of at least part of the future for science documentary (or documentary full stop).

Meanwhile, its content provides just one more instance among zillions to suggest that George Will is something more or rather less than an idiot:  he’s either deluded or deceitful.

I’m referring of course to sea-icegate.   I know, I know:  I’m way late to the game with the latest Will/Post follies.  It’s partly because I still can’t believe that all it takes for you to get viewed as a serious thinker is the willingness to wear bow ties in public under the age of 75. Will has never seemed to me to be someone to bother with.

More generally, his eminence as an example of a conservative public intellectual has always had the same kind of emperor’s clothes problem that beltway respect for obviously wrong right wing arguments has always enjoyed.  It’s particularly acute when ideology confronts science, as Will’s does here.  A gift for glib phrase making and a capacity to turn out clean prose on deadline is not much help if the actual data are against you.  In such circumstances, it is necessary to have the capacity not to grasp that which is inconvenient to know.  But the problem there is that willed ignorance is another way of saying dumb. Dim-by-choice is still a few bricks shy of a load.

Think of it another way:  there is probably something like a normal distribution, a bell curve, that describes the quality of thought and expression of the punditocracy — MSM or new variant — on either side of the political spectrum.  But one in which someone like Jonah Goldberg (or Rick Lowry) makes as far to the right of the curve as they do, implied by the status of the publications that carry their “work” (sic) suggests to this observer that the entire curve is shifted left.  (Sorry guys. Convention, you know.)

In that context, it doesn’t matter if Will shines in comparison to, say Jonathan Wells when it comes to a discussion of science as it touches public concerns.  Being on the right tail of a bell curve crammed painfully off towards the origin (sorry Jonathan; convention, you know), is not much of an encomium.

So when George Will made a nonsense of the history of climate research, and gave in to the kind of crazed conspiracy theorizing last validated by that noted holder-of-liquor and friend-to-Jesus’ countrymen, Mel Gibson, I couldn’t get much roused.

But as a former fact checker at Discover, some decade or more before the esteemed Carl Zimmer played the same role, I have to say that I have never read anything this pitiful from a media organization that used to have some pride:

George Will’s column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors.

(Post ombudsman Andy Alexander, desperately wondering what happened to his youthful faith in the transcendent virtue of journalism in a democracy)

Let me translate:

Will’s employees ask, “Mr. Will:  are you sure about this stuff?”

Will answers:  “I’m George Will.  Of course I know this stuff.”

Employees:  “Ok then.”

Will’s editors say, “George.  Anyone going to sue us over anything in here?”

Will:  “Nope.  Ice floes the size of Texas got no standing.”

Op. Ed. Editor:  “George, this is great!  Real man bites dog stuff.  Anything I should pull for the blow-up quote?”

Will:  “Whatever you like; that’s why they pay you the big bucks.”  (Chuckles.)

Copy Editors:  “Mr. Will. This looks very clean as usual.  You might want to think about this comma splice, though.”

Will:  “Good catch, my bravos.  We keep you alive to serve the machine.” (Chuckles.  Louder as he realizes no one laughs with him.)

This is to say:  Alexander’s is not the description of anything approximating real fact checking.  You need someone institutionally empowered with independent authority to go back to the original sources for each and every claim in a work.  And then that person has to be able to  confer with the writer about how to accomodate what they have learned in the mutual knowledge that nothing gets published until the checker is satisfied.

Carl Zimmer has written to this point already.  Check out what he has to say, it’s a damn good piece.  (Bonus points if you get the joke embedded in the last sentence.)

I’ll just add here an anecdote to illustrate Carl’s point and mine.  Back in the dawn of time, when my computer still had a chisel-and-slate input device, I fact checked the occasional Lewis Thomas column written for Discover. I did what you did:  call everyone, go to the library (chisels/slates, remember) look up the papers.  Once — my first go-round on a Thomas piece –  I found he had got the description of one of his source’s  important arguments wrong.  Not horribly so — but as written it was off, a paragraph that misread one of Robert Axelrod’s claims.  I don’t actually remember the details (this was literally a quarter of a century ago.)

Nervously, I called Dr. Thomas — then as or more famous than, say, Stephen Jay Gould — to tell him what Axelrod had told me.  I waited for the pushback, and got ready to haul in editors as necessary, but I wasn’t looking forward to the exchange.

And then Thomas got on the line.  He was perfectly unfazed, calm, kind and interested in what Axelrod had actually said.  We talked the point through until he was sure he got what the problem was, and then we worked through the changes that would correct the text in ways that would allow Thomas to make his larger argument. As I recall, the emphasis in the piece shifted  a little to accommodate his altered understanding of the work he was trying to bring to light, and after about a half an hour or so we were done.

Over the few months that I did my share of fact checking, I had to look over a Carl Sagan piece, one by Gould, and a bunch by some of the writers who had got to the magazine ahead of me.  Carl could be a job to track down,* and Gould really didn’t like being corrected on the little stuff (but my bosses said I had to; if there were 43 widgets in some corner of Victoriana and not 42, that had to be right and the author informed of the change), but they both understood the process, and each was polite to the very junior person, me or another, nit-picking a path through their prose month after month.

In the years since then, I’ve been fact checked plenty myself, and have been saved from public embarassment more than once by some dogged 20-something who wouldn’t let a sloppy description of, say, adaptive optics, slip into print.

The critical thing to understand here is that neither Gould nor Sagan, (nor, more quietly, Thomas) lacked self confidence.

Will clearly does, and I would say with reason.  What you see in this episode is a kind of cowardice none of those other writers ever displayed.  The only reason you don’t take fact checking seriously is because you do not dare to subject what you think you know to any kind of test.  That’s ok, if suboptimal in private life.  It’s not acceptable when you shout from one of the bully-est pulpits in American media.

Which, of course, brings the matter back to rest with those actually to blame for this:  the people and the corporate culture that allowed Will’s tripe to reach print.  I still romanticize the Post for Watergate; watching the Nixon presidency unravel was the formative political event of my high school years.  The Post has glided for decades on that triumph, and what this episode makes clear is that there’s nothing left of that Institution but the name across the top of the front page.

Sad.  I actually feel for ombudsman Alexander.  It must suck to the dregs to have to stand up on one’s hind legs and utter what one knows to be pure weaselry.

*Carl Sagan was the inspiration for my image of certain people as embodiments of Schroedinger wave functions.  Unless you  perform some kind of physical impounding, they remain oddly distributed over all possible locations.  Y’all know  who you are.

Image:  Jame Gillray, “The impeachment, or “The father of the gang turned Kings evidence,” May 1791.  Those with sharp eyes will enjoy the fact that the image shows Edmund Burke indicting his former co-conspirators (as the cartoonist would have it).  Let the patron saint of conservatism, more cited than read (it was ever thus) chastise one of those many who have for decades taken his name in vain.

Self Promotion: Really, really good wine dept.

My friend Abel Pharmboy, host and voice of Terra Sigillata, has just done me the honor of posting an old piece of mine about drinking a legendary wine — Chateau d’Yquem — for the first time.  I wrote I don’t know how many years ago for an airline magazine now long since evansesced.  It’s fun, and if you like reading about conspicuous (and delicious) consumption, go for it.

And while you’re there — if you haven’t checked out the serious stuff that Abel deals with when not thinking about cost-efficient ways to pay homage to Bacchus, dive into the real meat of his blog.

That is all.

Image:  Jan Vermeer van Delft, “Girl with a Wine Glass” 1610.

Headlines that make you go hmmm

Try this one.

Memo to self:  the internet is not in and of itself a source.

Somehow, somewhere, William Randolph Hearst is smiling.

What Darwin Said/Wrote on His 50th Birthday.

[cross posted at So Simple A Beginning, where a group of us are reading The Origin together.]

Happy Birthday, Charles!  A day or two –  or four late.

With that out of the way, what happened on the great day?  Not quite now, nor then, not 200 years ago, but rather, on Feb. 12, 1859, the day Darwin turned fifty?

That birthday, of course, came nine months before he published the book that is the reason for the odd bit of hullabaloo you may have noticed around the web (and bricks-and-mortar “reality”) as well.

The answer, from Charles’ perspective?

Not much good …

…and the reason for Darwin’s discomfort?

That same, dominating, seemingly terrifying book.

Here’s what Charles Darwin wrote to his cousin, William Darwin Fox, from Moor Park, the water-cure establishment to which he had retreated to secure relief from his persistent stomach troubles:

I have been extra bad of late, with the old severe vomiting rather often & much distressing swimming of the head.

Now, as Darwin points out, this is an old complaint, a re-eruption of the distressing symptoms that he had first experienced in Chile during the voyage of the Beagle. As such, this is mere incident, part of the fabric of a life often lived in great discomfort.

But with Darwin, it never does to ignore the  mind-body connection.  Consider the sequence:  on 18 June, 1858, Darwin received the famous parcel from Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalizing in the Malay archipelago (now Indonesia), which included the younger man’s sketch of a theory that described the mutability of species through a selection mechanism very close to Darwin’s own ideas about natural selection.

Darwin had some hints of Wallace’s interests before, both through Wallace’s published work and in correspondence between the two, but this, coming in the midst of his own attempt to distill a the work of a decade and more into a write up on the species problem, came as a terrible blow.

His friends famously rallied him:  presenting both Wallace’s paper and some of Darwin’s unpublished work to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858 — thus establishing Darwin’s joint priority with Wallace, and laying the ground for Darwin to claim pride of place if he could only present the first fully developed argument for the ideas that he and Wallace had broached…

…which is why, from the summer of 1858 through the autumn 1859  publication of what became On the Origin of Species, Darwin was hard at work, extracting from his proposed much longer work what he called “an abstract” of the larger argument.  It was that effort, much more than any birthday, even so canonically fraught a milestone as the two-score-and-tenth, that consumed Darwin.  Certainly, he had no doubt as to the source of his physical distress:

My abstract is the cause, I believe of the main part of the ills to which my flesh is heir…

At first reading, this line  plays to those who retail the conventional account of Darwin as deeply fearful of the dreadful secrets he was about to reveal in The Origin. It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that the man who wrote of confessing to a murder early on in his consideration of the species problem might break under the stress of going public with his conclusions.  And it is true that Darwin did play his cards close to his vest for years, and that he was determined, at the least, not to go widely public with his thinking until he felt his arguments were ironclad.

What then of the long-running argument that Darwin’s illness was not psychological, not a trick played on his unfortunate body by his  conflicted mind?  The most common diagnosis of an infectious cause of  Darwin’s gastric symptoms is that of Chagas disease, which is supported by the fact that Darwin wrote in his journal of the voyage of the Beagle that, one night while naturalizing in Chile,

“I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca (Vinchuca), a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one’s body. Before sucking they are quite thin but afterwards they become round and bloated with blood.”

The Benchuca bug is the insect carrier of  Chagas disease, and the fact that this illness produces many of the symptoms that Darwin endured, plus this gold-standard report of encountering its vector persuaded a number of high profile Darwinists to entertain the suggestion after it was proposed in 1959 by Dr. Saul Adler, a tropical medicine specialist.  Among them — Ernst Mayr, writing in the introduction to the Harvard University Press facsimile of the first edition of The Origin of Species I’m using for this project.

There are, though, serious problems with the diagnosis, not least that Darwin lived a long life characterized by a lessening of the symptoms that seemed to strike at moments of greatest stress with remarkable regularity.  Writing more recently than Mayr, many Darwin experts have come to see the search for a specific point-source of Darwin’s illness to be a mug’s game.  Here is Janet Browne on the subject in Charles Darwin:  Voyaging.

...he only recorded being bitten by benchucas some months after this illness [his collapse on the way from Santiago to Valparaiso in 1834]…and that incident was not followed by any of the fever typical of sleeping sickness [Chagas] infections…Chagas disease was endemic in Chile and the characteristic symptoms of infection…would not have gone unremarked…Yet there was no serious sugggestion that a South American disease could be to blame [for Darwin's post-Beagle illnesses], although once or twice in extreme old age Darwin attributed his breakdown in health to this Valparaiso attack.  (Voyaging, pp. 279-280).

Browne goes on to suggest that “sour new-made wine seems as good areason as any for disorders in Chile,” while noting that the purgatives he was prescribed for his symptoms “would have incapacitated the hardiest.”

In the end, without exhuming Darwin and being fortunate enough to retrieve enough biological material to run retrospective diagnostics, it is likely that the question of exactly what laid Darwin low on his fiftieth birthday (and all the other times) will remain unsolvable in any absolute sense.  There doesn’t even have to be a single cause, nor an exclusively physical or psychological account.

Still, it is important to pay attention to what Darwin himself tells us.  No man or woman may be a perfect witness to their own state of being, but at least Charles was first on the scene.  He knew, or thought he did, what ailed him: his abstract was making him sick.

But for all the evidence — and there is plenty — of  Darwin’s doubts and even genuine fear of public ridicule or worse in the 1840s, it does not follow that Darwin in the late 1850s, already working on his much longer version of the story he compressed within The Origin of Species, was vomiting up terror at his presumption.

It is always a risky game to psychoanalyze from a distance.  But we do have direct testimony here:  when pressed, not by disapproving public opinion but by the threat of professional eclipse, Darwin turned out to be eager, even swift to write up  his ideas for as wide an audience as he could reach.

It seems to me that Darwin himself gives us a simpler explanation for his manuscript’s role in his illness.  In essence, he had been working too hard.

And in that context, his letter to Fox betrays a hint of relief, and the prospect of better days to come, given that “I have only two more chapters & to correct all, & then I shall be a comparatively free man.” Even better, Darwin told his cousin, his peers were falling into line.  “I have had the great satisfaction of converting Hooker & I believe Huxley & I think Lyell is much staggered.”

This does not sound to me like a man cowering before the enormity of what he was about to do.  This is someone who, when not retching into the bucket by his bed, is getting used to the scale of his achievement.

You go, Charles.  Happy 200th, yet again.

Images:  Charles Darwin at 51.  According to the son of Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin, this portait is by Messrs. Maull and Fox, ; he writes that “the date of the photograph is probably 1854; it is, however, impossible to be certain on this point, the books of Messrs. Maull and Fox having been destroyed by fire.”  Other sources date the photograph from 1859 or 1860.

Map of Alfred Russell Wallace’s travels from his book The Malay Archipelago, 1869.

Sunday blogging; Now this is what I call living, breathing and eating ….your politics

…and the best thing about this story is that I learned a new job category:  pastry artist.

Plus the fact that when I googled the term “pastry artist” I was led via a face book page of a self-described practitioner of the craft to this gem of a video:

Darwinization!

This is just to announce that the promised Darwin project So Simple A Beginning has in fact gone live.

This is an ongoing farrago for which I hope everyone here will find some time to join in:  we’re going to be reading Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (first edition) from stem to stern, reacting on the way.

When I say we, I mean first a group of authors that have agreed to chime in on more or less regular schedules; I’ll be the utility infielder, but I’ve got around me a team of all-stars:  Darwin biographer Janet Browne, Evo-Devo guy Sean B. Carroll, my own colleague John Durant, science writer and bon vivant Carl Zimmer, rising star Alex Wellerstein, and others to be named later.  We’re going to be going through Darwin’s seminal text at the rate of about a chapter a month — maybe a touch more quickly — and we will, if all goes well, end up with a range of commentary to help place The Origin in its own time and in ours.

And that “we” again:  it includes everyone who decides to take part, to read, react, and to post their thoughts as the collective we makes our way through the most important written work of the last two centuries (and yes — I don’t think that’s hyperbole).

The site had its soft opening yesterday, with no fanfare, but there are now two posts up about the introduction, along with one with a bit of background on what edition of the Origin we are reading and why.with some more to come over the weekend and early next week, so if you’re interested — stop on by.  Much more to come.

Image:   Plan of the HMS Beagle: Middle section fore and aft, upper deck, 1832. From A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the countries visited during the voyage round the world of H.M.S. Beagle under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R.N., By Charles Darwin, M.A., F.R.S., with illustrations by R. T. Pritchett of places visited and objects described.

If Mitch McConnell (or, say, Judd Gregg) were a Mensch…

…pigs would fly, I know, but if McConnell had any sense of decency he would do the following:

Vote for the stimulus package in the Senate.

Why?  So that his colleague, Sherrod Brown, would not have to leave his mother’s wake (say that again, in all caps:  HIS MOTHER’S WAKE) in Ohio, fly to DC, cast his vote, and then fly back to Ohio in time for his mother’s funeral (say that again, in all caps:  HIS MOTHER’S FUNERAL) tomorrow.

I mean, there is no doubt that the bill will pass.  There is no question that Brown’s vote will be the needed 60th to ensure passage.  The only other option, the only other vote to provide the margin of those who voted at the last, procedural hurdle is Ted Kennedy, and he’s dealing with brain cancer (caps again:  BRAIN CANCER), so it falls to Brown, trying to bury his mother, or some one Republican with a sense of decency sufficiently developed to switch his or her vote in Brown’s stead.

And what gravels me is that there would be no political price to be paid for such a switch — in fact, it would have only benefits for the brave senator to do so, and for his or her party.  It could be made clear that this is purely  a gesture, not of bipartisanship, but of sympathy and support for a co-worker dealing with a terribly rough time.

No one would accuse McConnell of betraying his principles (he has some-?-ed.) (shhh–tl) were he to so vote.  He could state very clearly what he was doing and why, (and send some sympathy Brown’s way).  He could be seen, for just a moment, as human being rather than a partisan hack.  Nothing but good could acrue to him here.

And I can’t believe there would be any electoral fall out that would follow what would be clearly understood by all as a classy gesture.  McConnell — or Gregg, or any of a number of Republicans of impeccable (sic) right wing ideological pedigree  — would be able to demonstrate a kind of reasonableness that the rest of their recent actions hide pretty well.

Even better:  they would be praised for the kind of gesture that the GOP has found it impossible to make in response to what polls show is a pretty effective campaign to suggest that they are refusing the proffered hand of a very popular president.

Plus, of course, its just the right thing to do, the sort of care you take for those with whom you work — even the ones with whom you disagree, who you may in fact dislike — just because it makes the world a slightly better place in a way that costs nothing.  Your mama told you to do such things; I and my wife work on my eight year old all the time to get him to internalize the notion that kindness is the default option in his dealings with the world.

Is this so hard to get?  To do?  If you are a Senate Republican, I guess so.

I can’t even get angry about this one.  It’s just sad.  These are damaged people.

Update: Hello to all dropping in from Balloon Juice — and thanks much to John Cole for the connection made.

Update 2: And to all of you dropping in from Grasping Reality… my thanks as well to Brad Delong for his notice of this quantum of rage.

Image:  Pawel Andrejewitsch Fedotow, “Funeral Clothing,” 1851.

The Day Before Darwin Day: Charles, At Home

I wrote the post below for last year’s Darwin Day, but given (a) that Inverse Square was in its infancy, with an audience to match, and (b) the fact that a lot more people pay attention to a 200th anniversary than the 199th,  I thought I’d repost it now, with a few edits to smooth at least some of the infelicities of the earlier post.  (Also:  remember to check in at Bloggingdarwin.com for tomorrow for the launch of So Simple A Beginning,  a group effort to create an accompaniment  to The Origin of Species. I’ll be leading that effort, joined by an all star cast of Darwininans and biologists.  Tomorrow, mind you.  We’re still fixing the bits and pieces and it ain’t live yet.)

As most probably know, much of Darwin’s writing is available online. My favorite way to pass (waste?) a little time is to look through the enormous correspondence now up at the site — 5000 letters, up to about 1868. In honor of the great man’s birthday, (199 — next up is the big year), I looked for what something that might give us a clue as to what he was thinking about 150 151 years ago today.

There’s no letter from February 12th 1858,* but on February 11, 1858, Charles did write to his son, William. It’s a nice little note, ordinary family news — mixed in with just a hint of what made Darwin, Darwin.

We learn that William has been at least acceptably conscientious about writing home from a visit to Norfolk. We find that Darwin doesn’t think much of that county, though he admits he’s never been there. (That’s a reminder, for those of you keeping score, of the peculiar Darwin fact that after the extraordinary adventure of the voyage of the Beagle, Charles remained quite stationary — the more so after he, Emma and the children moved from London to Down House in Kent in 1842.)

The older Darwin tells his son of some minor matters of family business: their gray mare has turned out to be too skittish — nearly overturning the cart a few days earlier — so off she must go for 25 quid to the local horse dealer. Darwin grumbles a bit — “indeed it is very inconvenient for us being with only one horse,” but tells William that he will not replace the ill-favored mare until the summer holidays.

And then, with no change in tone, Charles sets William to work:

“As Norfolk is near Suffolk, look out for me, whether there are near you any Suffolk Punches or large Cart-Horses of a Chesnut colour; if so please observe whether they have a dark stripe or band down the spine to root of tail; also for mere chance, whether any trace of a cross stripe on the shoulder, where the Donkey has, & any cross-stripes on the legs.”

Darwin, of course, had already written up the significance of stripes and other markings on horses in a brief essay on the significance of the striped markings of horses and their relatives  as part of what would become the “Laws of Variation” chapter of The Origin of Species.  The Origin would not be published until the end of the following  year, though, and Darwin never let an opportunity go by to extract yet one more fact to serve within the natural historical foundation of his theory.

In other words: if you read The Origin, and even more if you dive into the long slog that is The Descent of Man you quickly come under the spell of Darwin’s gentle but relentless assault-by-data, organized around one never-wavering thread of argument.

Darwin did not triumph by direct, exuberant attack — that was Huxley’s job, (among others) ably taken up these days by all the usual suspects. Instead, he lulled friend and foe alike with observation after observation, striped horse after barred donkey. You come out the other side enmeshed, not necessarily in the grandeur of this view of the world,  but in its meticulous accumulation, the coherence in which Darwin has organized all his disparate knowledge into a single convincing whole.

And in this one letter, written the day before his birthday 150 years ago, you can see Darwin in his gentle way storing up yet more ammunition in an arsenal he never ceased to replenish.  Do be a good boy, William, and just take a look at a couple of Suffolk horses for me…
And then it’s back to the family — a trip to London in the offing, a vase to be sold to pay for some new watercolors that will, Charles promises William, “make the new Drawing Room look stunning”– after, that is, Darwin pays the surveyor for the work done on the house. Charles, in full parental mode, asks for reports on school work, and then says good bye:

–”My dear old fellow | Yours affect | C. Darwin”

How did Darwin do his great work?  This is how:  through his own observations; through years of thought; and through the community of affection and interest he created around him — the family, friends and strangers who supplied him with the knowledge he could not discover himself.  At the heart of the whole enterprise:  the fact that Darwin always, in any circumstance, even in a casual note to his son, found his way to one more chunk of hard fact.

Images:  Charles Darwin with his son William, 1842.  Daguerrotype
Gong Kai, “Emaciated Horse” after 1279.  Location:  Osaka Municipal Museum.  Source for both images:  Wikimedia Commons.

Balloon Juice is Right

It is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel (memo to self:  has anyone ever actually done this?), but GOP craziness on basic macroeconomics does make for some tasty ridicule.

No one is delivering that abuse better right now than the crew at Balloon Juice, proprietor and recovering Republican John Cole, along with Tim F. and the new co-blogger DougJ, both whom hail from that subgroup of the reality based community that knows the three laws of thermodynamics.*

As for GOP idiocy on tax cuts/opposition to enabling Americans to work, see Cole here and here, Tim here, and Doug here, just for starters.  It’s an impressive haul for one morning’s work, but I want to pick up on one stray thought from DougJ’s contribution.  He writes

The stimulus package proposed by Obama is right out of a macroeconomic textbook (albeit with too many tax-cuts), as Paul Krugman puts it. To let them off the hook because they’re Republican or southern, or whatever the excuse is, is almost like some kind of racism.

To put that another way, I think what we have here, from the media and from the chattering classes in Washington, is the subtle bigotry of low expectations.  Time for the No Republican Left Behind Standards in Economics Argumentation Act of 2009.

Unfunded, of course.  They can afford to pay for the needed tutorials themselves.

That is all.

*Numbers 1-3, which can be loosely translated thusly:  you can’t win; you can’t break even; you can’t leave the game.

Image:  Adriaen van Ostade, “The Schoolmaster” 1662

Program Notes: A Heads Up for Some 02138-ish Darwin Events

Greater Cambridge (MA) folks:  much for-the-public Darwin wonderfulness on tap at the Harvard, its environs, and in particular ar the Natural History Museum up Oxford Street.*

You can see the whole run of stuff between now and March here.

The big day, of course, is this coming Thursday, February 12, when Charles will be 200 years young.  You can Darwinize at Harvard from ten a.m. on with what promises to be one of the more challenging performances to capture in its entirety:  a live reading of the entire Origin at locations around the Harvard campus.

I have to say, that while I take second place to no one in my regard for that book (you’ll see evidence of that over the next year at this site, which will go live on Wed. or Th.) this one seems a little daunting; I’m not sure I can take in one dose  that much grandeur in this view of life.

But there will be more, culminating in Janet Browne’s lecture,”Darwin at 200:  Rethinking the Revolution” at the Geological Lecture Hall at 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, (“our fair city”) MA, starting at 6 p.m.  Browne is, of course, the eminent Darwin biographer, and, incidentally, will be contributing to the blogging Darwin/Origin commentary project referenced above.

What’s more, if you’ve a mind, Olivia Judson will be lecturing at Wellesley College on Tuesday, February 17.  Given the pleasures of her writing, this should  be good.

*It’s one of the ironies of local history that the Natural History Museum in which much of Harvard’s celebration of Darwin will take place is the successor/umbrella organization that houses the Museum of Comparative Zoology, founded by Louis Agassiz.

Agassiz was a Swiss geologist and naturalist whose ideas about glaciation (a) formed one of the major breakthroughs of mid-nineteenth century geologist, and (b) confounded the young(ish) Charles Darwin’s theory about the formation of the “roads” of Glen Roy in Scotland.  Agassiz was also, after he emigrated to Boston and embedded himself at Harvard, became one of the most prominent critics of Darwin’s ideas about evolution, which embroiled him in regular battles with MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers.  (See  Selby Cull’s account of that war  here — Selby is my former student — in her thesis, online at MIT’s archive. (Link leads to a PDF).

Agassiz was on the losing side of those debates, and has taken a fair amount of his lumps over time.  (See Guy Davenport’s heartfelt, but oddly off target essay in this collection to see one attempt to ressurrect the old Harvard man.)

But for all that his faith bound him to reject an idea for which his own work helped lay the foundation, Agassiz was a great teacher and an original thinker, and it still seems to me worth remembering the man with the imagination to recognize the possibility of sheets of ice covering continents (pretty powerful selective pressure, there, don’t you think?), as we honor the greater thinker in the House that Louis  Built.
Image:  Conrad Martens, “HMS Beagle at Tierra del Fuego” from The Illustrated Voyage of the Beagle.